staying.cool

i’ve jumped.

from half to full.

i’m not talking about cups. or bandwagons. or jacks. or pogo-sticks. or any other random association you might make.

the fact that you’re reading this sentence in your reader, should give you a clue.

i’ve read more than a few posts, such as this, and this, this, this, this, this, this [i assume you get the idea now]; all of which play devils advocate on the topic of partial RSS vs full RSS feeds. you have those who prefer to have a summary so they can decide, those who believe some kind of freedom is being affected, talk about the possibility of spamming, and those who talk of advertising advantages. now, i personally don’t mind clicking through on a partial feed (especially given a fx extension that lets me do it in reader direct), and more than a few spammy pings convinced me a few years ago to switch into partial feeds as well. recently, i have even started putting in custom summaries [see how much i love you guys?].

i do mind having my content stolen by spammers [eg: right here].. even if only a few people read it in the first place but, i’m going to suck it up, and no, this is not because i read a lot of posts about how people don’t read partial feeds as much. at all.

i have currently enabled full feeds for everything in this blog, if you do a ‘refresh’ in reader for my feed, you should see it take effect. this is not a momentous occasion, though i’m trying my best to make it feel like one

man, do i make a big hoo-ha about the most random of things..

update: “random of things”?! and not one of you said a thing? damn, damn, damn, damn..

having spent 3 hours of my life in trying to get a dual-monitor setup + compiz on ubuntu 8.10, i have come to the conclusion that it is simply impossible.

[note: this is on a machine with 2 X300SE ATI cards which are connected to a dell (1280x1024) and a sony (1024x768).]
observations:

• ATI+ubuntu = configuration hell. always has been and always will be. make it the seventh hell of hells when you add a dual-head setup into the mix. nvidia (from all the forums) is apparently much nicer.

• ubuntu natively picks up my monitors + resolutions. impressive.
• compiz appears to need the restricted ATI drivers to even work, on this latest iteration. once they are in there, it just works (on a single screen setup). beautifully. memories of spending 5 hours grappling with xorg.conf are sweet mythology.
• if one ditches compiz, and sticks to the open-source drivers, there’s still no scope of managing to ensure that different monitors run at different resolutions, and all work together to form a single desktop. the sony seems like the screen is extending way beyond the actual monitor with icons somewhere in the air above it.
• the ATI catalyst GUI sucks. cannot set up monitors at different resolutions, does not understand how to arrange monitors, ends up setting up the 2 monitors as a single LARGE widescreen, $^%#^&^$…
• default for all graphics configs (initially) is to clone outputs on both screens all the time. why?
• due to this lack of configurability, i have to either downgrade res to 1024×768 on both and have wonky compiz effects, or not have compiz at all.
• i somehow managed to enable a 2560×1024 (don’t ask) screen expanding across both monitors, to find that my cards only support upto 2048×2048 (ok, this is slightly invalid, but i was highly frustrated by this point anyway). ergo, compiz still won’t work.
• ubuntu without compiz effects seems dinky to use, and somehow extremely non-intuitive without all the flashiness.

now, while i’ve always been a fan of the terminal and all the cool commands that you pull out of the hat in linux… why isn’t there even an alt-tab command in linux? or any apparently simple way to set it up? compiz has ultra-funky features, and ubuntu has…nothing? what sense does that make?

incidentally, i had to reboot after an update (first time ever, for a non-kernel update). nasty memory of windows rebooting in the middle of my experiments ensued.

i’m impressed with the ease of setup. ubuntu has come streets ahead since i used it last in 7.10. lack of user-interface customization tells. big time.

solution: back to winxp with ultramon installed. such simplicity. maybe i will now move to winvista-32 or 64 on this machine, just for the heck of it.

crossover works great though, installed office 2007 directly on ubuntu. very cool. too bad the one thing keeping me on windows is the customization, rather than office.

finding the image composite editor has been one of the better finds in the last few months. panorama stitching has never been so easy, and yet have enough options to get the photos together nicely.

its also gotten me back on updating my flickr. its been 6 months, its probably time i get back to playing around with photos. i must also fix my ubuntu install to work with 2 monitors, figure out how easy it is to hack my camera and my psp, and set up a new phone without it overheating on me.

i need to get back to research at some point too.

the net is abuzz with the latest google move: google chrome. people are trying to figure out why ? what ? how ?

i type this post from chrome, and i see: a combo of ie8 and firefox3. to go. with bits of safari and opera all thrown in. even this review is just thrown together from initial impressions.

disclaimer: i firmly believe that firefox 3 is the best browser around.

back to the show.

we have speed dial. we have the ‘omnibar’. we have privacy. we have cool animations when you move tabs out of windows, for urls on pages, previews, search etc. we have download managers. we have auto-bookmarking. we have combined features from 3 different browsers which attempt to integrate together. and they do, somewhat decently.

however, i don’t like the philosophy.

why would apple expect the iphone 3G with its unsurpassably (crappy) features:

Surprisingly, some of the niggling features that were missing in the iPhone 1.0 continue to be overlooked. There’s still no copy-paste functionality, no MMS sending, no Flash capabilities, no A2DP (stereo Bluetooth)… Yes, at Rs.31,000 and thereabouts, the iPhone dangles a hefty price tag…if you take your eyes off its $199 pricing in the US and judge the iPhone purely on the heft of what you’re acquiring in terms of a gizmo, perhaps the picture won’t look so disappointing after all. After all, when has Apple ever sold sundar, tikaoo maal that was sasta — especially in India? Woefully however, the carrier lock-in story for the handset continues… You won’t be able to swap Vodafone to Airtel to Idea willy-nilly –– or when you are travelling abroad, to Matrix to SingTel. You will have to stick to that very Voda/Airtel SIM you’ve plugged into iPhone even in your wanderlust. That, for a 31K phone, is a mite distressing.

to be so wanted in india ? the country where the N96 is to be launched early. seriously. you might as well ship them all back to the US and keep selling them to people who have close to no idea just how convergent a device a phone can be.

based on the release notes for the latest beta of firefox, all i can say is: wow. i’m blown away, and then some. how something like IE8 even hopes to compete, i don’t know. safari is always a boo-hoo, and opera, i’m sorry to say can’t really measure up in terms of compatibility.

the question will soon be: how did people browse the net before firefox ?

meanwhile, i skirt dangerously on the border of killing myself for the next deadline. however, i know that this is the reason i’m doing any of this in the first place. i’m loving every minute of it.